T5 door lever repair?

[Sunny43.5]

Lucky for you maybe our hits were just bad luck ah well thems the brakes . Howard

[NOTVWR&D]

Hi,

My MY11 T5 Australian delivered Multivan front LHS passenger door lever stopped working a few days ago. It was as if the linkage had come loose - which it had.

When I removed the door card I experienced the problem as shown by Cousin below.

First my rant: I cannot believe that some VW engineer thought that the best idea would be to make the cable holder an integral part of the the entire door card. That they thought that a tiny bit of plastic would do the job. Furthermore I cannot believe that VW R&D ran any endurance testing on this component that would simulate the thousands of times that a door could be operated in its lifetime.

While there are some good solutions on this forum, here is mine:

See the picture and the stainless steel plate.

1. I took a 1mm thick piece of stainless steel plate. I cut it with tin snips to shape it. Then I bent a right angle into it. On the LHS you can just see the bent up lip. It stands about 8mm high. You may have to adjust the height of it a bit to get the cable to fit nicely into it.
2. Brown arrow - I drilled a small hole through (you can just see it) which I passed the cable hook and the thin part of the cable sheath. The existing forked ends to the cable sheath stay but do nothing apart from abutting the cable sheath to the plate.
3. The blue arrow points to a place where I had to bend the plate to go over an existing welded rivet.
4. The purple arrow points to a cable tie that passes through the two holes. The cable tie is tied when reassembling and holds the cable sheath so that it is correctly pointed and supported in the direction of the brown arrow.
5. The green arrow and circle point to where I used a sharp wood chisel by hand to remove some of the broken cable clip so that the cable can move cleanly in that area. You could use a box cutter/stanley knife.
6. The yellow arrow points to the hole where the hook on the end of the cable connects to.
7. As you can see, I used two short (8mm or so) self tapping screws to attach the plate. Careful not to use long ones that would pierce through the entire door card.

Does it work? It seems to... I did it yesterday. Time will tell.








































Cheers,

Daryl

I'm gradually ticking off all the things that go wrong on a T5

Up to the door lever now

Broke the other day as I went to get out, pulled it apart today and unclipped this bit off the end of the door release cable






This is where it came off, and it certainly is a poorly thought out design
This bit breaks off, it looks like a complete new door panel. Bloody waste







What I want to do is mount the broken bit back where it came from, but to be strong enough to stay I'll need to glue the two broken edges together with something that melts or fuses plastic together
But I also want to glue the back of the broken bit to the panel behind it
Then just to make sure I'll glue a piece of thick(ish) plastic over the front of this repair







But I don't know what glue I should be using
I need something that basically plastic welds, that is, melts the plastic surfaces to each other
Also need it to be able to span a 1 to 2 mm gap on the back, and not shrink or go brittle

I'm really not up with my glues

Anyone have any ideas what will do the job

I'm happy to leave the door panel off for a few days, or a week even, to make sure it sets properly

Thanks in advance



M